The present invention relates to systems and methods for providing trading systems, and more particularly to trading systems that allow traders to improve prices in an active trading market.
Electronically based trading systems have gained widespread popularity over the years. Such trading systems are frequently used for trading items ranging from financial instruments (such as stocks, bonds, currency, futures, contracts, etc.) to used household goods (such as old records, antiques, etc.). In many of these trading systems, bid/offer-hit/lift processes are used to negotiate a sale of a given item. In connection with such processes, bids and/or offers for items are entered into a trading system and a hit or take is submitted in response to a bid or offer, respectively, to agree to a sale, or a purchase.
A typical exchange that uses bid/offer-hit/lift process is the NASDAQ Stock Market. In the NASDAQ, traders are able to submit bids/offers to a market specialist. The market specialist examines the bids/offers received and sets a price for buying and selling a particular share. For example, assume that the market specialist is collecting offers for a particular stock. After the specialist receives all the offers, the trade closes and the specialist may pick the lowest priced offer as the selling price. Thus, every offer submitted without a limit order is sold at that price. One disadvantage of this process is that the sellers cannot improve the price of their shares during an active trade. That is, when the sellers submit their offers to the market specialist, they cannot submit an improved offer until the next open trade. In addition, these sellers are not informed of the market price until after the market specialist selects a price. Thus, sellers may not be provided with the opportunity to gain improved prices over the current market price while the trade is active.
While there are markets that provide substantially direct trading between buyers and sellers, these markets do not provide an opportunity for buyers and sellers to improve prices on an actively traded item. Rather, these markets require traders to submit improved price orders in inactive markets.
Traders may want to submit price improved orders on an item currently being traded in a particular market. Traders may not want to wait until the trade closes before they can submit a bid. Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide systems and methods for enabling traders to improve the current market price for a selected item in an active market. In particular, price improvement facilitates trading because the financial incentive for trading with price improvement benefits both the seller and the buyer.